Tag: Forest Products Working Group

Categories
Uncategorized

Woodland Owner-Brand Owner Summit allows for open, honest dialogue on sustainable forest management

This past week GreenBlue’s Forest Products Working Group, and the American Forest Foundation (AFF) hosted a successful, first-of-its kind summit, Woodland Owner and Brand Owner: Opening a Dialogue about Sustainable Forestrythat brought together a diverse set of America’s family forest owners and several well-known marketplace brands, including Mars, Incorporated; McDonald’s USA; Time, Inc; McMillian Publishing; and Staples. The event truly achieved its goal, and opened up dialogue between the two groups about their respective values and challenges relative to sustainable forest management and how they might work together to meet their goals.
AFF event logoFamily landowners make up the largest ownership group in the United States, collectively owning more than one-third of forests in the country, more than the federal government or corporations. These forest lands belong to 22 million individuals, whom all have unique motivations and reasons for owning land. These family lands are a key source for wood fiber that flows into supply chains that later become coffee cups, paper, candy packaging, and much more. Nationally, the US Forest Service (USFS) estimates 47 percent of all timber removed from forests in the US comes from family lands. In the South, specifically, 51 percent of wood removed from forests and supplying companies comes from family-owned land.
The Forest Products Working Group, last fall, initiated a partnership with AFF, the leading conservation nonprofit in ensuring we have sustainable wood supplies, clean water, and wildlife habitat come from family-owned woodlands. The partnership focuses its work in promoting constructive and transparent dialogue across the forest products supply chain to address shared sustainability challenges and opportunities.
The Summit, which was held in Chattanooga, TN, opened up honest and thoughtful discussions between both ends of the supply chain.
LogosTo kick off the Summit, woodland owners described why they each owned land, noting family legacy, income, and a love of nature. Responding to questions from brand owners, they also described challenges they face such as insects and disease, natural disasters like wildfire and hurricanes, high management and property costs, and declining markets. Concerns about trust, and the future of the land as it is passed on to future generations were voiced as well.

“I finally feel like I have a seat at the table,” stated one landowner from Georgia. “I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this event and to collaborate on how we can work together.”

Brand owners, in return, shared their distinct company goals, with many encompassing common threads.
Reducing their companies’ environmental footprint was very important, as companies want to be able to provide goods and services, without unintended consequences, or social and environmental impacts. Brand owners also shared a desire to have more visibility into their supply chains to better understand where the fiber is coming from, reduce risks and to be more inclusive of family woodland owners in their sustainability planning process. And brand owners described a desire to build trust with their customers and demonstrate the sustainability of their suppliers and the complex network of indirect suppliers that help them source their materials.

“Its important to my company to know that our supply chain is reducing its impact,” said one brand owner. “We loved hearing directly from landowners, very interesting and insightful.”

20160302_103424
Emerging from this session were three key themes: building and maintaining trust, ensuring the long term or future of forests and its sustainable fiber supplies and building new markets – all of which were further explored in roundtable discussions.
Trust, brand owners stated, is vital to developing relationships with their customers, who want to know their products come from sustainable sources. “We use certification now as a tool to demonstrate sustainable and create trust, because it’s the only tool we have, but it does not always satisfy our needs,” said one brand owner.
Land owners described how they conversely desire to feel trusted. “We have been doing good management for years, because it’s in our best interest and we want to leave the land better than we found it.”
Both brand owners and land owners spoke about their desire to ensure the future of the forests and the wood supply that comes from it, particularly in the Southeast. One brand owner said, “we get nearly 95% of our wood supply from the Southeast. There’s less risk sourcing from there and it logistically makes sense. We want to help make sure this supply is available in the future.”

“My landhas been in my family for five generations,”stated a landowner from Tennessee. “I have had to deal with some challenges based on what future generations did, so I want to make sure that my children don’t inherit these issues as well.”
20160301_102115 copy

Thinking of the future, opportunities for new markets were discussed in detail as well. “What will happen to that resource [forests] if there isn’t demand for it?”stated a brand owner. “A little competition could have a positive impact.” Emerging markets such as biomass and more green building with cross-laminated timber were noted, as well as the need for further research and development around wood fiber.
Building on insights gained at the Summit, in the coming months, GreenBlue’s Forest Products Working Group and AFF plan to continue the discussion, expanding the dialogue with other key partners in the forestry sector to help inform new strategies or the refinement of existing ones to encourage and verify sustainable forest management in the U.S.
This event was made possible through the generosity of our sponsors Staples,McDonald’s and Georgia-Pacific.
 

Categories
GreenBlue Sustainability Tools Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Why Aren’t More Forests Certified?

Protecting and managing forests, and all the essential services forests provide, is critical to the well-being of our planet and its inhabitants. Forests provide clean air and water, wildlife habitat, and a home to an enormous and vast array of biodiveristy. Forest also provide recreational value, resources we depend on every day, and support economies all over the world. Forests are so much a part of our everyday lives they are often taken for granted. How can we protect forests when we depend on them for so much?
Active forest management, and particularly sustainable forest management (SFM), are strategies to help strike a balance in the relationship between society’s needs and maintaining forest health. Forest certification programs, first introduced in the 1990s, are one tool that have been established to assure stakeholders SFM practices are being followed. The Programme of the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) gives a good definition: “Sustainable Forest Management certification provides forest owners and managers with independent recognition of their responsible management practices … certification provides forest owners and managers — families, communities, and companies — with access to the global marketplace for certified products.”
Today only about 12% of the world’s forests are certified to third-party systems such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). This is despite the fact that many companies request certified wood for their products. Demand in many industry sectors — solid wood, paper, and packaging — is much greater than the supply of certified wood. It begs the question: Why aren’t more forests certified?
This was the fundamental question that SPC’s Forest Products Working Group (FPWG), a collaboration of 20+ companies across the supply chain, spent the last year and half trying to answer. Working across the forest products value chain, from landowners to brand owners, the the FPWG companies found that there are a number of reasons why forest certification has not been more widely adopted, with a specific focus on the United States.
Through a series of interviews, workshops, and research, the group has found that the underlying issue is that forest certification needs to offer a more compelling value proposition to small private landowners in the United States. Likewise, forest certification also needs to offer a more compelling value proposition to brand owners. Over the course of the next few months, the FPWG will be sharing their findings from this project, including the process the group used during the project called the Value Innovation Process, or VIP. An approach that was integral to developing our findings because we asked, first: “What is the job that forest certification is hired to do?” Or in other words, getting a better understanding of “what is the value of forest certification” before looking at ways to fix certification as is.

Using the VIP, the FPWG sought to understand why many landowners and forest managers have opted not to seek certification. At the other end of the value chain, we also explored the dynamics driving leading brands and other corporations to focus on buying certified products. We also reached consensus that there are many uncertified forests that are currently practicing sound, sustainable forest management. Against this backdrop, the group is seeking to find additional strategies to enhance the value of certification.
The FPWG interviewed numerous members of the value chain including landowners, foresters, loggers, merchants, printers, manufacturers, brand owners, associations, consultants, and more. The FPWG hosted two in-person Summits where we brought value chain members and representatives from FSC, SFI, and ATFS to discuss strategies to better drive the value of forest certification. The findings were numerous. Often complex. And in the spirit of innovation, not surprisingly, findings varied enormously. In the next few months the FPWG will be discussing sharing in more detail what we heard across the value chain.
In the context of the VIP, we continue to seek answers to complex questions such as:

  • How might we gain assurance of Sustainable Forest Management when certification is not an option?
  • How might we focus on value chain members who can have the most impact on driving the value of forest certification?
  • How might  we address feedback that certification is overly complex, expensive, and does not deliver optimal desired value?
  • How might we stimulate better dialogue across value chain from landowners to brand owners?
  • How might we overcome perceptions that landowners are not practicing sustainable forest management?
  • How might we educate multiple stakeholders about forestry and forest ownership?
  • How might we create a better value proposition for small private landowners and brand owners?
  • How might we create market incentives, policies or other mechanisms that will fundamentally help keep forests as forests?
  • How might we explore innovative strategies to go beyond certification?
  • How might we gain a better understanding of supply and demand?

In the spirit of innovation, we welcome input from multiple stakeholders as we continue to tackle these complex issues.  Stay tuned for more findings and notices of upcoming events.

Categories
Uncategorized

Advancing the Conversation on Forest Certification

Members across the forest products supply chain met in Charlotte, NC on June 12 for GreenBlue’s first-ever Forest Certification Innovation Summit. The workshop brought together representatives from across the forest products industry including forest owners, loggers, paper manufacturers, printers, brokers, retailers, publishers, professors and more to discuss the value of forest certification and strategies to help drive this value.
Having members from across the entire supply chain in one room provided a unique opportunity to hear diverse perspectives and ideas as participants discussed the challenges of growing forest certification. For example: recognizing the need to better understand value drivers for small landowners in the United States; understanding which customers in the value chain are best positioned to drive adoption; and how to leverage constructive dialogue across the supply chain to grow forest certification.
A day of lively discussion produced interesting takeaways. One of the most valuable takeaways came from small landowners who expressed the need to include or reinforce value drivers outside of those typically associated with forest certification. For example, innovative ways to demonstrate and verify responsible forest management that are more aligned with how their land is being managed, as well as mitigating sourcing risk and concerns about illegal sourcing. At the other end of the supply chain, brand owners communicated the value of forest certification in helping to establish trust with consumers. In this regard, there could be strategies for brands to help make the connection between forest certification and consumer values. By introducing strategies that better align with the most important drivers of forest certification for each link in the value chain, we can begin to achieve the shared goal of responsible forest management.
Since the summit, staff and committee members have been working to utilize the day’s output  to develop strategies to deliver the value that supply chain members have indicated would best drive growth. GreenBlue will publish these results and ongoing efforts in an online resource outlining the project process and results up to this point, as well as the strategies to develop and deliver better value moving forward.
We will also continue to conduct outreach with stakeholders across the forest certification supply chain including a workshop at SPC Advance, Thursday, September 11. SPC Advance will give us our first opportunity to share the Summit results with a larger audience, and will help identify participants for the next step in the process – engaging the most important customers. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to me via email at tom.pollock@greenblue.org.

Categories
Uncategorized

From Trees to Paper: A Tour of a Paper Mill

GreenBlue held the second-ever Forest Products Working Group meeting earlier this month at founding member Domtar’s headquarters in Fort Mill, SC. The full day meeting was extremely productive as the Working Group moves full steam ahead on its inaugural project, creating a common framework for sustainable paper products. Time was also dedicated to identifying the next project for the group to undertake.
An optional tour of Domtar’s state-of-art Marlboro integrated pulp and paper mill was offered to all Working Group members the day before the meeting. Domtar rented a van a drove six of us two hours away to Bennettsville, SC where the mill operates. The Marlboro mill is a relatively new pulp and paper mill built in 1990 and has an annual production of 338,000 tonnes of pulp and 389,000 tonnes of paper. We were fortunate to get a tour of the entire operation, from the trees being brought in and chipped to a final 35 tonne roll of paper coming off the paper machine. Our host Lewis Fix of Domtar also took us to a converting facility that takes those giant roles of paper and cuts them down into regular office paper that gets fed into your copy machine.

The most fascinating part of the entire tour, to me, was the paper machine. If you ever have an opportunity to visit a mill and actually see how pulp (a tree fiber slurry comprising of over 90% water) starts at one end and travels through a series of dries, presses, starching, and rollers over the distance of almost an entire city block, I would highly recommend it. These machines run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, putting a 140 miles (that’s right, I said miles) of paper on a roll in about two hours. The precision the paper mill operators are able to control and the thickness and basis weight is astounding.

Every pulp and paper mill around the globe has a different and unique way of making paper, from the chemical recipe used in pulping to the design of the paper machine, all to utilize available resources and create a product with unique value in the marketplace. The challenges related to environmental stewardship in the paper industry are very complex and have global implications. GreenBlue and the Forest Products Working Group recognizes the complexity of these challenges and see the value of convening with industry leaders to bring innovative and science-based solutions to the industry. I look forward to continuing to work with this group and its future members, in addition to getting to participate in any future facility and paper mill tours.

Categories
Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Seeking Leadership Companies for GreenBlue's Forest Products Working Group

We are pleased to announce that we have opened up membership for our Forest Products Working Group and we are seeking leadership companies to join this important effort.
The Forest Products Working Group brings together leading companies that rely on paper, wood, and other forest products to share their knowledge and develop new solutions for making their businesses more sustainable.
The group, following the successful blueprint of GreenBlue’s industry-leading Sustainable Packaging Coalition, launched in October 2011 with eight founding members of notable and diverse companies from across different industry sectors. The founding members are: Avery Dennison Corporation, Avon Products, Inc., Bank of America, Catalyst Paper, Domtar, HAVI Global Solutions, Sappi Fine Paper North America, and Staples.
We believe the Forest Products Working Group takes a unique approach to corporate sustainability by bringing together stakeholders to tackle unmet challenges in the forest products sector. Our members pool their resources and bring innovative thinking to identify solutions that work for business, people, and the forest.
After a founders meeting in December, the group announced its inaugural project will be to design a set of clear, science-based guidelines to inform decision-making for paper design, procurement, use, and recovery. Additional areas of potential future work include increasing the quantity and quality of recovered fiber, alternative fibers, and increasing the availability of fiber sourced from sustainably managed forests.
Any company that relies on forest products to meet business objectives—including paper suppliers, consumer product goods companies, retailers, publishing companies, and building product manufacturers—is invited to join the group.
For information on membership eligibility and benefits, and to apply for membership online, please visit the Forest Products Working Group page of our website.